#editathons

There were 15 participants at the institute editathon in Kentucky, and another 8 participants who joined us remotely from three locations, for a total of 23 people. Collectively, this group created or worked on 34 articles - 13 about people, 8 about languages, and 13 about topics and organizations in linguistics, and also sorted over 85 linguistics-related articles for stub status.  

Thanks to the institute organizers at Kentucky for putting the editathon on the schedule and arranging the room, as well as Kristen Syrett and Claire Bowern for organizing local lingwiki events at Rutgers and Yale. 

Here’s a detailed “How do I decide what to edit?” guide that I put on the whiteboard. 

Do you work on an understudied language or dialect? --> Edit that!

Are you a native speaker of a language other than English? -->  Edit its Wikipedia! (Maybe translate an article from English)

Do you want to get to know the field better? --> Find a notable linguist who doesn’t have a biographical article yet and make one, especially of a female linguist, linguist of colour, or other underrepresented linguist. Make sure that your article includes how this person meets Wikipedia’s notability criteria for academics with a citation before you hit “save” the first time!

Looking for tiny, unloved articles to edit? --> Google “linguistics stubs” 

Feel like you don’t know enough linguistics to help? --> Try stub sorting using the guide at bit.ly/lingwikistub 

If you participated in any of the editathons but don’t see your article on here, just put it in bit.ly/lingwikisurvey and I’ll update the list. You can also check out the slides at bit.ly/lingwiki if you want advice on how to edit for linguists, or go to wikiedu.org if you’re thinking of assigning Wikipedia editing as a class assignment.

Here’s a list of articles edited. Feel free to check them out and see what else you can add!

People (13)

Ingeborg_Hoff

Kelly_Berkson

Draft:Kathryn_Campbell-Kibler

Judith_Aissen

Emily_M._Bender

Terttu_Nevalainen

Moira_Yip 

Anne_H._Charity_Hudley

Category:Linguists_of_the_Australian_aboriginal_languages

Peter_Austin_(linguist)

Pierre_Delattre

Laurence_R._Horn

Felicity_Meakins

Languages (8)

Bungandidj_language

Australian_Aboriginal_languages

Chadic_languages

Biu–Mandara_languages

Afroasiatic_languages

Austronesian_languages

Constructed_language

Dravidian_languages

Topics (13)

Babel_(magazine)

Ultrasound_tongue_imaging

Valleyspeak

Q-Principle

R-Principle

Q-based_narrowing

Mouthing

Fronting_(phonetics)

Coercion_(linguistics)

Hindi_kinship_terms

Prosodie (French) 

Laboratoire_de_Phonétique_et_Phonologie

I organized several Lingwiki editathons in conjunction with the International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation at the University of Hawaii Manoa. We had a total of 37 participants who edited at least 29 articles, including 15 about languages, 5 about topics and organizations, and 9 about people. 

One participant commented, “I am one of about 3 people in the world who knows enough about the grammar of this language to edit its Wikipedia article.”

Thanks to the University of Hawaii Manoa, the organizers of ICLDC and especially Andrea Berez-Kroeker and the student volunteers who assisted with organizing the editathons. 

Here’s a list of articles edited. Feel free to check them out and see what else you can add! 

If you participated in any of the editathons but don’t see your article on here, just put it in bit.ly/lingwikisurvey and I’ll update the list. You can also check out the slides at bit.ly/lingwiki if you want advice on how to edit for linguists, or wikiedu.org if you’re thinking of assigning Wikipedia editing as a class assignment. 

Languages (15)

Yurok_language Igbo_language Anii_language Vurës_language Vera'a language Nivaclé_language Mlabri_language Yasa_language Kala_language Shor_language Awetï_language Gyele_people Kwasio_language Iau_language Sikaritai_language

Topics and organizations (5)

Ka_Haka_‘Ula_O_Ke‘elikōlani,_College_of_Hawaiian_Language Language_nest Tepehua_de_huehuetla  (on Spanish Wikipedia) Kaipuleohone University_of_Hawaii_at_Hilo

People (9)

For the third consecutive year, I organized a lingwiki editathon at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, which this year was in Austin, Texas. We had 23 participants who together created or edited 20 articles (listed below) -- 5 about linguists, 8 about languages, and 7 about other topics in linguistics. 

This year I was very pleased to see again several participants from previous years. Thanks especially to Lauren Collister, Moti Lieberman, and User:Babbage for helping out other participants in addition to their own edits, as well as to Lauren Gawne for supporting people in the #lingwiki hashtag on twitter. Thanks also to the Wikimedia Foundation, the Wiki Education Foundation, and the LSA for their support.

I also gave a talk on a panel about linguistics outreach to high school students, which I co-organized with Moti Lieberman, about stumbling into linguistics online via blogs and Wikipedia, what’s been done so far and how to get involved. There were about 120 people in the audience and the slides for my talk are CC-BY and available at bit.ly/lingwiki-lsa2017.

I’m also pleased to report the beginnings of a collaboration with Wiki Ed and the LSA Committee on the Status for Women in Linguistics (COSWL) and Committee on Ethnic Diversity in Linguistics (CEDL). Wiki Ed has been working with many linguistics classes on editing Wikipedia as a class assignment, but it can be hard to fit biographies of linguists into more topics-oriented classes. However, graduate seminars often want to each students about an academic career trajectory, how to read an academic website/CV, and so on, so editing biographical articles is a natural fit. But since Wiki Ed doesn’t have as much linguistics-specific knowledge, COSWL and CEDL are working on putting together lists of notable linguists who don’t have articles or whose articles need improvement, so that Wiki Ed can direct classes to them. If you’re interested in potentially having a class edit Wikipedia, check out wikiedu.org for ideas. 

Here are the articles edited in this editathon. Feel free to check them out and see what else you can add!

Topics

Alveolo-palatal_fricative Alphabet_soup_(linguistics) Semantic_overload Online_discussion Idealized_cognitive_model FrameNet Anglicism

Languages

Chatino_language File:Chatino-map-wikipedia.svg Chickasaw_language Tz’utujil_language K’iche’_language Xavante_language Wichí_languages Mapuche_language

People

What Is #Moodle AMOS And How You Can Use It To Internationalize Your Moodle Team? #MoodleNews

Early in its history, it became evident that the community Moodle would be serving is global. To allow the increasing volume of volunteers that help with translating Moodle, AMOS, or the Automated Manipulation of Strings application, was born. Equal parts technology and community, Moodle encourages users to use AMOS in collaborative, group-based projects where a consolidation of a community…

I ran a Wikipedia editathon at Queen Mary London on May 23, where 11 participants worked on 9 articles in 5 languages (or 72 articles depending on how you count).

Thanks to David Adger for setting the QMUL editathon in motion, to Shivonne Gates and Christian Ilbury for organizing the event itself, and to Stuart Prior from Wikimedia UK. I was also pleased to see a couple people from SOAS, where Charlotte Hemmings and Lauren Gawne have been organizing monthly lingwiki editathons since fall 2015, and I hope that this is the beginning of more lingwiki collaborations between the two institutions! 

The format of the editathon was the best yet: we started at 10am with tea/coffee and then went to 2pm with a short break for lunch in the same room. Although it was the same length as the Chicago lingwiki editathons, the break for lunch in the middle made it feel shorter and provided more opportunities for informal chats, while still being long enough to get substantive editing done. 

The article stats are a bit different this time because we had a few participants who made small edits to many articles (63 articles), including updating citations and adding links to information in the Endangered Languages Archive. Substantive edits happened for 9 articles - I didn’t get links for all of them as not everyone filled out the survey, but from observation, people were using the MediaWiki Content Translation tool to translate articles into Turkish, Arabic, Persian, and Chinese.

Here are some links to articles edited. Do check out the articles and continue adding to them if you can! 

Multicultural London English Audience design Linguistic marketplace 

社会语言学 (Sociolinguistics on the Chinese Wikipedia)

The third linguistics Wikipedia editathon took place over the last weekend of May/first few days of June, with 32 participants and 43 articles edited overall in four languages. 

The main event was an in-person editathon that I organized at the annual meeting of the Canadian Linguistic Association / Association canadienne de linguistique (ACL | CLA) in Ottawa, where we had 24 in-person participants. This was the first editathon that was sponsored by the Inspire grant I received from Wikimedia, so many thanks to them for their support in the food and travel costs. The CLA|ACL itself co-sponsored the food budget, and in addition sponsored the translation of the how-to slides at bit.ly/lingwiki into French at bit.ly/lingwikifr, which now join the Spanish slides at bit.ly/lingwikies as a resource that anyone can use. 

The food helped a lot in getting participants out, since it meant we could schedule the editathon over lunchtime and attract more people. For perspective, the first #lingwiki at the LSA, where there was no food, had slightly fewer in-person participants (21) drawing from a much larger conference. (Around 100 CLA attendees means that about a quarter of attendees came to the editathon, whereas around 1000 LSA attendees meant that about 2% came to the editathon.) A huge increase!  

We also had small satellite editathons in Singapore (organized by Lauren Gawne of superlinguo)  and Melbourne (organized by Rosey Billington), and thelingspace participated online via the #lingwiki hashtag. Thank you to all these organizers, to the CLA organizers and volunteers who helped me coordinate that event, and of course a huge thank you to all the participants of the editathon itself!

Also, mark your calendars -- four more editathons will be happening on Wednesdays of the LSA summer institute in July and on the #lingwiki hashtag, again with food courtesy of Wikimedia. 

Pictures, graphs, and a list of all articles edited in this editathon are below.